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Dissertation
New Hypotheses and New Methods: Searching for Sources of Astrophysical Neutrinos from MeV-Gamma Ray Blazars and a Binned Likelihood Analysis of the Galactic Plane
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Drexel University
Sep 2024
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/00010755
Abstract
The origins of high-energy, astrophysical neutrinos remain largely unknown. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has discovered a flux of these particles but has not yet been able to fully identify their sources. This work presents two novel searches for sources of astrophysical neutrinos. The first examines a new hypothesis by searching for neutrinos from blazars in the first catalog of Fermi-LAT sources below 100 MeV. Blazars are a highly luminous class of the already powerful active galactic nuclei which have for some time been expected to produce high-energy neutrinos. The high-energy photons produced alongside these neutrinos are expected to lose energy, thus this analysis searches for neutrinos from blazars detected in the MeV-gamma ray energy range. This analysis does not find any astrophysical neutrino emission from the sample of blazars, but sets strict upper limits on their contribution to the diffuse neutrino flux. The second search is a new analysis method developed to search for neutrinos from the disk of the Milky Way using a 100 gigabyte-scale dataset. This binned likelihood technique was built from the ground up to perform the necessary functions of a neutrino source analysis. Although the data and analysis method implementation used in this work did not provide a competitive sensitivity for the Galactic plane source hypothesis, the binned technique could be further optimized and will be beneficial in future cases where large amounts of data are used.
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Details
- Title
- New Hypotheses and New Methods
- Creators
- Michael Anthony Campana
- Contributors
- Naoko Kurahashi Neilson (Advisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Drexel University
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
- Publisher
- Drexel University; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Number of pages
- x, 66 pages
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- College of Arts and Sciences; Physics; Drexel University
- Other Identifier
- 991021906712604721